The practise “Just Like Me” is a variation of the well known loving kindness practise.  It allows us as mindfulness practitioners to widen the circle of awareness to move beyond reflecting purely on our own experience and reaching out to others those that make up the common humanity that we so often speak of in mindfulness.

The loving kindness practise invites us to not only turn kindness and compassion inwards it invites us also to offer that same caring compassion to others. The “Just Like Me” practise takes it a step further and invites us to consider someone in our life who perhaps we don’t find it easy to get on with, who we might find frustrating or –  to use a modern idiom – who we find pushes our buttons and to start at the point “they are just like me.”

This might seem counterintuitive but by learning to see those people who challenge us as essentially being just like us, driven by hopes and fears and worries, it enables us to relate to them differently. This doesn’t mean just being nice to them or pretending that there aren’t difficulties, but what it does do is allow us to see those difficulties in a wider perspective.  We can recognise that they too are driven buy things that upset, worry and frustrate them and that this is often what is driving their behaviour.

This also allows us the space to recognise them as human, breaking down the ideas of “you and me”, “us and them”. These divisions start in the mind but drive wedges into society, from the person we struggle with in the workplace all the way up to the roots of global conflict.

Once we can recognise in those who challenge us that they are essentially “just like me” we can start to change the way we relate to them, bring compassion to them also give ourselves the mental space to respond with nuance to them and the difficult situations rather than with rejection or anger.

Ultimately this practise is freeing it enables us to step back from the friction that can cause to suffer when we engage people who we find difficult.

This is the beauty of mindfulness, this is the beauty of compassion, this is the beauty of interconnectedness. Just like me that person wants to be happy, healthy, to feel safe and go through their day with a sense of ease.